> Levon said he helped write it to make sure Lee was respected.
Wikipedia does say, “The song was written by Robbie Robertson...In his 1993 autobiography, This Wheel’s on Fire, Helm wrote, ‘Robbie and I worked on “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” up in Woodstock. I remember taking him to the library so he could research the history and geography of the era and make General Robert E. Lee come out with all due respect.’”
One odd thing about the mention of “Robert E. Lee”: “Back with my wife in Tennessee, when one day she called to me / ‘Virgil, quick, come and see, there goes the Robert E. Lee.’” [The Band] I’ve always assumed that meant a riverboat named in his honor, and though some lyrics sites leave off the “the”, you can clearly hear it in the videos of both The Band and Joan Baez.
(If such a riverboat still existed, though, we’d soon have demands that it be renamed.)
As I understand it “the” was not in the song originally. Historians say people were always thinking they saw Lee. It was changed because that’s not part of history so modern listeners didn’t know that fact.
As a side note, and something I’m proud of, I worked at KFFA in the 70s. This is the station Levon said he’d hang out at during lunch break from the fields. I was there a few years ago and was interviewed on The King Buscuit Show with Sonny Payne. He referred to Levon as Lee. (I would guest host the show in 1973 when Sonny took a day off. We hadn’t seen each other since 1974.)
And the show intro pushes the Civil War historical sites in the area.